Witch Bottles – Texas Beach Trophies

Witch Bottles – Texas Beach Trophies – by Liam Sweeny.

One of the cool things about living near a beach is you never know what’s going to wash up. One of the not-so-cool things about living near the shore of the Hudson River is that you never whether the thing that washes up is going to give you cancer or not. But in Texas, at the real beaches, they’ve been seeing a curious sight when they look down at the sand.

Witch bottles. And not just one. A few.

Witch bottles aren’t some boutique thing you can but at a store alongside crystals and incense. Well, you probably can, but we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about bottles that have barnacles growing on them, bottles that have been out to sea for a while.

Okay, so witch bottles were big in the 16^th and 17^th century. Real witchcraft, real deal. Point of a witch bottle was to put a spell, and some “witchy” items like iron nails, leaves, fingernail clippings, Happy Meal toys…

Scratch that last one.

The point was to use the spell to get rid of bad juju, maybe a curse that someone put on the witch. They get chucked out to sea, and from there, who knows?

Well, we know. They end up in Texas.

I wonder if only the big curses show up in Texas, because, you know…

Truth is, they have no idea how old the bottles are, except that they’re old. And these researchers were smart enough not to open any of them. They wouldn’t even bring them in their houses. So the circus we call current affairs can’t be pinned on witches.

I kind of want one. But I kind of don’t, you know. There’s a story I’m hitting you up with tomorrow about Haunted Honey, which is harvested from New Orleans mausoleums. It’s the same deal. So cool, I want it, but my luck is bad enough and I don’t need it to get any worse.

I’m going to make my own witch bottle. It’s going to have aspiring and mineral ice in it, get this lumbar juju out of here.

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